J.D. Salinger Crumples Up Yet Another Story About Troubled Boy From New York

Story by Ben Plowman 

| Published Nov 17, 2009

For the fourth morning in a row, famed author and recluse J.D. Salinger threw away the beginnings of yet another story centered around a smart yet unsettled high school aged boy living in New York. As justification for ending the stories so early, Salinger is said to have remarked that they were almost exactly the same as “that God Damn 'Catcher in the Rye.'”

Previously, Salinger had tried a female main character, which almost immediately started to sound like a female Holden Caulfield — or at the very least a college-age female protagonist from his novella “Franny and Zooey.” In every attempt Salinger has made to write since 1965, when he last published, the story doesn’t feel quite right until the home city of the main character has eased its way into upstate New York and the character has started attending a private boys' or girls' only school where he or she feels detached from everyone else.

It has been suggested that Salinger spent the better part of the 1980s trying to get past rewriting stories he’s already written by making his male protagonist older. Rumor has it, however, that the stories could never get more than ten pages without the man turning into a Vietnam war vet and killing himself, as happened in Salinger’s breakout short story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

There were plans as recently as this year to publish new work by Salinger, but for unknown reasons, they have all fallen through. Publishing industry insiders do suspect, however, that part of the dry spell might be attributed to Salinger’s feeling that he and everyone else around him is “a big phony.”